Sophistic Resistance, Feb. 06 - Techno-minimal evolution

Combining beach life with shopping precinct values, mapping strained spatial divisions between working class Australian pubs and upwardly mobile clubs for 20-somethings in polo shirts with upturned collars, Adelaide suburb Glenelg is not the place I would expect to find minimal techno dotting the record store shelves. Nevertheless, there I was on the day of Christmas Eve 2005, ploughing through second-hand CD racks on the search for the ultimate bargain. After an eternity of luckless drilling, Robert Hood’s 2002 album Point Blank glared balefully at me from the morass, its monochrome austerity the gateway for the entrained eye/ear.

Hood’s history is unimpeachable. Minister For Information for the primary ‘second wave of Detroit’ techno outfit Underground Resistance, Hood worked on their X-101, X-102 and X-103 series of concept 12” singles before internal dissension cracked the UR hull, Hood jumping ship with founder member Jeff Mills to work on the Waveform Transmissions series for Mills’ Axis label. Hood’s solo recordings for the Tresor label, alongside his own M-Plant imprint, are some of the bedrocks of minimal techno, alongside other ‘second wave of Detroit’ producers like Richie Hawtin/Plastikman.

Hood’s Internal Empire album from 1994 is so unrelentingly spare and borderline-punitive that it fully deserves dance music critic Simon Reynolds’ description as ‘the aural equivalent of a bread-and-water regime’. Point Blank eases up a little on the monastic discipline, offering minor rapprochement with starcrossed texture (the gorgeous “Sauna” sounds like a precursor to the fireworks-in-deep-space, astral bell-ringing techno of Canadian producer Mathew Jonson’s “Magic Through Music”), but the dedication to austerity and cyclic structures is still in evidence. It is an uncomfortably gorgeous record and one of the few relatively recent minimal techno productions from Detroit that isn’t a grid-locked, time-warped indulgence.

I’ve been listening to and thinking about minimal techno a lot lately, I suspect mostly in reaction to the plenitude of options offered to current fans of German techno and house. Spearheaded by the Kompakt label, once the bastions of German minimal techno, over the past four or five years German techno has absorbed and digested the glitch as production style, rediscovered its pop roots, injected the 6/8 schaffel rhythm into the body of pop music, and brought the song back into full glare. Furthermore, it has done all this while maintaining its position as the engine room and dissemination point for modern techno. It’s been thrilling to observe, swimming through the near-profligate weight of 12” singles pouring from Germany and the subsequent feverish discussion through blogs, discussion boards and the odd clued-in music magazine.

So, with all of the above to choose from, why would you return to minimal techno? Well, one reason is to map out why recent German music differs so much from its purported predecessors, and also to garner a ‘roadmap’ of sorts to the complex, intertwining histories of German techno. Another question is: In a genre with supposedly as little room to move within as minimal techno, where music is made with such reduced means, how, in the mid to late 1990s, did we get from Hood’s “Minimal Nation” to the sheer oddness of Kompakt head Wolfgang Voigt’s M:I:5 project in such a short period of time?

The relationship between Detroit and Germany has always been strong: Berlin is Detroit’s second stronghold, its home away from home. Berlin’s Tresor label released some of the most archetypal Detroit recordings and documented the two-way idea exchange on compilations like Tresor II: Berlin-Detroit, A Techno Alliance. Tresor and Frankfurt’s Force Inc label (later to spawn the seminal glitch imprint Mille Plateaux) were deeply indebted to Underground Resistance; Berlin’s Basic Channel/Chain Reaction family boiled Detroit techno down to its most essential, resulting in a sound that was glacial, monolithic, faintly religious and completely mind-blowing.

Cologne, the home of Kompakt, doesn’t really figure in these histories, maybe because Cologne’s legend as the most relaxed and convivial of the cities isn’t so conducive to the sometimes grandiose concepts and stately-cum-stentorian vibe of so much Detroit music. Instead, the key producers of Cologne minimal techno, Wolfgang and Reinhard Voigt, Jörg Burger and Jürgen Paape, came from somewhere else. Indeed, you might say that, if Detroit invented minimal techno, then Cologne inverted it. It was a completely fresh sound, a Colognic irrigation.

Wolfgang Voigt produced some of the strangest minimal techno ever. His sonic lexicon is brim with clacking clicks, backward drums and hi-hats, pendulous bells and chimes, and odd waves of moon’s-surface texturology. There is something almost discomforting about his production techniques, whereby he spools clattering loops onto a steady 4/4 pulse so that they gnaw away at each other, like octagonal shapes stumbling down a steep hill and bobbing in murky water. If Voigt’s series of twelve Studio 1 singles wrote the book on Cologne minimalism, then his M:I:5 recordings, particularly those collected on the Maßtab I:5 album, dot the pages with arcane symbols all the more compelling for their awkward design and clumsy rendering. This sound is truly psychedelic - deeply, madly, deliriouly so.

Wolfgang Voigt’s minimal techno sides sit miles apart from the humid, alpine lushness of his ambient recordings as Gas, or the endless plateaus of sweet-tooth electronica that make up his collaboration with peer Jörg Burger entitled Las Vegas and released under the Burger/Ink alias. (Some of Voigt’s earliest and most infamous productions were essayed under the pseudonym Mike Ink.) If Wolfgang’s techno comes off a little skewed, that’s nothing compared to his brother’s recordings under the Pentax and Sturm aliases. Wolfgang at least gestures toward melody and the aromatics of sound, where brother Reinhard strips everything back to a steely and pulsing core. Sturm’s Sturmgesten has to be the most reduced, dank recording in the techno canon, its slow bleed rhythms swallowed up in a mudslide. Sturmgesten sounds like slow-motion techno desperately gasping for air. The Pentax albums, similarly, solarise techno, burning gaping holes between every beat.

Wolfgang Voigt barely releases any new music, bar the odd remix or collaborative track with his brother or other members of the Kompakt family. Reinhard does better: on the recent Kompakt compilation Total 6, his track was an underrated highlight, pitting another of his protean rhythms against an angle-grinder working away at a moving horse-cart, the stones and rocks underfoot spraying in every direction. But Kompakt generally made a decisive shift away from minimal techno in the early 00s - indeed, when I interviewed Kompakt alumni Michael Mayer in 2003, he stated simply, ‘Minimal is 1990s.’ So when Kompakt recently announced the formation of a new sub-label, K2, dedicated to ‘classic Kompakt-style minimal techno’, I was surprised - and all ears.

As it turns out, the latest batch of 12” singles on K2 posits the ‘return to minimal’ discourse as a minor red herring: if anything, K2 suggests a return to the 12” as DJ tool, as the K2 releases are some of the Kompakt axis’ most dancefloor-friendly titles in some time. Sure, it is relatively minimal, but Robert Babicz’s “Mister Head” is as catchy and burbling as a Metro Area production, though lighter on the disco-ball texture. Maybe the minimalism is writ in the details - the little morse-code pings that skitter through Babicz’s “Sonntag”, the reliance on a confluence of simple, unadorned programming and weighty chunks of asphalt bass, or the slow, careful unfolding of tone-fabric throughout most of the K2 catalogue.

Babicz’s single feels the most anomalous of the three most recent titles. Gui Boratto’s “Arquipelago” comes closer to what we expect of minimal techno, with a dusty old organ plying a three-note vamp over piston-pulsation rhythm and hollowed, clacking electro woodblocks. Florent’s “G-Net/Ritournell” is the strongest of the three 12”’s - Florent scrawls bubbling patterns over the most carefully caressed mainframes, the minutiae yielding little dovetailing melodies and electronic peeps and trills that sound like clockwork birds descending onto a turntable.

As it turns out, K2 has a lot more to offer than just minimal techno. For all Mayer’s claims that K2 was built for newcomers, claiming that ‘the mothership Kompakt's schedule is absolutely full with the string of albums to come and a few 12"s in between. What's missing is enough slots for classic Kompakt-style minimal techno EP's - which is unbearable for us...’, K2 only gestures toward minimal techno: these tracks lack the melodic flourishes of the Kompakt imprint, but they’re not stripped to the bone.

Though the K2 releases are only notionally minimal, it’s still worth thinking about what the term means in current dance music. Minimal techno is one of those forms that will keep on keeping on - there are always going to be ascetic types who are drawn to the severity of the genre at its most… well… minimal. With some of the releases on K2, as well as certain titles on the Kompakt imprint itself, the Kompakt Empire approach minimal techno from a different angle.

This may be due to a change in the dialectical relationship of minimal. Whereas once minimal techno positioned itself to the side of techno en masse, as the most frugal and disciplinarian that techno could be, within the Kompakt circle minimal becomes just one of many colours. Positioned against Kompakt’s romantic populism as opposed to techno, minimal techno has more space to breathe; subsequently, its parameters have widened. Perhaps this represents a shift from minimal-as-Reductionist to minimal-as-relativist.

In some ways, I miss the undulating strangeness of mid 1990s Cologne minimalism, but the recent changes within the Kompakt set-up mean that it’ll be hard to return to that sound. Voigt’s productions came from a specific creative ferment that was mad for minimal and intent on creating its own sound. Indeed, in an interview with Andy Battaglia, Michael Mayer characterised the first wave of Cologne techno producers as the ‘bastard brother of techno in a way. The purpose from the beginning was to be very unique, not to rip off the Detroit sound or sound like British producers—especially Wolfgang, who showed the way to create something that would be different from what you could take from America or France or anywhere else…We’re searching a lot for rhythms and aesthetics from what surrounds us.’

Conversely, Kompakt is now a universal model - for example, K2’s Boratto is from Sao Paolo, and Florent is based in Alsace-Lorraine. Moving from local to global, the definitional edges have started to fray, and minimal techno now - of course - embraces so much more. It’s still monochrome, but the sepia has started seeping in…

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